Water Cooling Solution from Intel

Introduction

During this IDF (Spring 2006) Intel officially demonstrated their water-cooling solution, called Intel Advanced Liquid Cooling Technology. This was really unexpected, since Intel is traditionally a very conservative chip maker, never paying too much attention to overclocking. Let’s take a look at Intel’s water-cooling solution.

Intel water-cooling solution has only two components: the radiator (a.k.a. heat exchanger), using a 120 mm fan, and the CPU block, which has a pump on top of it.

Figure 1: Intel water-cooling solution.

Intel put the radiator on the back of the computer case, to be the close to the CPU and thus making the pipes as short as possible. Because of that, you will need a new case in order to use Intel’s water-cooling system. By the way, if you pay attention in Figure 1 you will see that Intel is using rigid pipes instead of rubber hoses. On next page we will explain all technical reasons behind this choice.

Figure 2: Radiator location.

As we said, the CPU block and the pump are assembled together in just one piece of plastic (PPS, Polyphenylene Sulphide, to be more exact), as you can see in Figure 3. On this figure, pay attention on the sealed input on the far left-hand side, which is used to fill the system with cooling liquid (the system comes already filled and the user doesn’t have to worry about filling it). The pipe in the center is the cool water input and the pipe on the right-hand side is the hot water output. So the cool water drops exactly in the middle of the block.

Figure 3: CPU block and pump.

The CPU block is copper-made, as you can see in Figure 4.

Figure 4: Base of CPU block.

Let’s go now into some more technical details on Intel’s water-cooling solution.

Gabriel Torres is a Brazilian best-selling ICT expert, with 24 books published. He started his online career in 1996, when he launched Clube do Hardware, which is one of the oldest and largest websites about technology in Brazil. He created Hardware Secrets in 1999 to expand his knowledge outside his home country.